Chapter Two
Taking a Power Trip
Spartanburg Day School, South Carolina
Like many communities throughout the United States, Spartanburg, South Carolina, seems like a place with few connections to coal. Situated at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, this small college town boasts six institutions of higher learning and a vibrant arts community. Though Spartanburg was formerly a center of textile manufacturing, most of its residents now work in health care, government, or education. Others work at the corporate headquarters of Denny's or the nearby BMW manufacturing plant, the only one in the United States.
So when Allyn Steele, a history teacher at Spartanburg Day School, was challenged to inspire a sense of civic responsibility in his students, his decision to direct their attention to mountaintop mining in Appalachia was not an immediately obvious one—nor would it necessarily be a straightforward one to carry out.
He could, of course, point to some basic facts connecting the Carolinas to mountaintop mining. For example, Duke Energy, headquartered in North Carolina, is the nation's third largest user of coal acquired through mountaintop mining.1 A Spartanburg Day School graduate and school board member ran a coal brokerage company. And trains carrying coal from Kentucky sometimes passed by the local greasy spoon, Ike's Korner Grille.
Like most of us, however, Spartanburg students didn't actually see coal being mined or burned. They couldn't truly grasp the meaning of “coal keeps the lights on.” And they had little, if any, knowledge about or feeling for the impact of modern-day coal mining on the people and ecosystems of Appalachia.
So Steele designed a course called “The Power Trip,” which examined the political, ecological, and economic consequences of coal energy—and most significantly, included a field trip to southeastern Kentucky.
On an overcast Saturday morning in February, Steele, another adult chaperone, and six students set out to drive some 300 miles, tracking as closely as possible the coal line that ran between Spartanburg, South Carolina, and southeastern Kentucky. When they arrived nearly seven hours later, the director of the retreat center in Letcher County, where they would spend the next several nights, welcomed and warned them: “You can't drink the tap water. All the water in the water system is tainted.”
Shortly after, they met with Patty Tarquino, an organizer with grassroots citizens' group Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, who would serve as their guide.3 A native of Colombia, South America, home of Cerrejón, the largest open-pit coal mine in the world, Tarquino had come to Kentucky to help educate people about the hazards of mining. On the students' tour, she would lead them through what she described as a one-day, back-to-back blitz, packed with things to see and people to meet.
The first day began humbly with a hike in the Bad Branch Falls Nature Preserve. Owned in part by the Nature Conservancy, this preserve spans almost 3,000 acres and boasts the largest concentrations of rare and uncommon species in the state.4 As the students made the trek, they occasionally helped each other scramble across a boulder or cross a creek, which Steele appreciated as team-building opportunities. But the primary goal of this trip was to see what Appalachia, one of the most biologically diverse regions in the country, looks like when undisturbed by human actions. Students saw rare flora and fauna and learned about how nature thrives in a system. They were told, as Steele recalls, “One has to be pretty respectful of all forms of life to keep that system in balance.” They were also being prepared for a lesson in contrasts.
“This is a beautiful place for us to enjoy,” Tarquino said as they reached a spot with a view of the 60-foot waterfall and pristine valley. “But a lot of valleys like this are being threatened right now.”
“What's up with that?” a few students asked.
They were about to find out.
After the hike, Tarquino drove the students and some other guests further into the mountains, up a narrow country road traveled primarily by coal trucks. She explained that private coal companies had purchased this public land to mine the coal reserves below ground. As they drove, they passed several posted signs along the roadway:
“I was kind of freaking out,” recalls Steele. “One wrong turn, and we'd fall off the mountain.”
Local residents Sam and Evelyn Gilbert, whose house had a view of Black Mountain, the highest mountain in Kentucky and one scarred by strip mines, also rode with the students that day. At night, they said, you could see the lights of the mining site from their driveway. And when a blast occurred, you could feel the whole house shake.
But what most concerned the Gilberts, they told the students, was that the mining company wanted to dump mining spoils into a stream that ran through their property. (The Gilberts fought the mining company's plan and eventually won, although they remain uncertain about the company's future actions.)5
Gilbert, who used to work at a strip mine, told the students that he knew what good surface mining was supposed to look like. He said that good surface mining practices required restoring a site to its original shape and soil contents. But that was not what the students witnessed. Nor is it what many people believe is possible after a mountaintop mining operation. After all, even if the land is restored to its former contours, the plants and animals that once thrived in that ecosystem often can no longer survive. The area looks oddly stark and lifeless as a result.
Moreover, once the mountaintops are blasted, the “millions of tons of crushed shale, sandstone, and coal detritus have to go somewhere, and the most convenient spots are nearby valleys,” reported John McQuaid in Yale Environment 360. “Mining operations clear-cut the hillsides and literally ‘fill’ mountain hollows to the brim—and sometimes higher—with rocky debris.” This leads not only to an altered landscape, but also to the burial of headwater streams and the permanent loss of ecosystems.6
In the final step before the coal is shipped, it is washed to remove soil, rocks, and other debris. This process produces massive amounts of coal slurry—water contaminated with toxins such as arsenic, lead, mercury, and selenium that is then stored in slurry ponds built into the side of the mountain.
The toxic water often leaks into groundwater supplies—and sometimes the pond walls simply break down. In 2008, for example, a Tennessee impoundment broke, releasing what the New York Times reported to be enough toxic sludge to flood more than 3,000 acres one foot deep.7 When a West Virginia impoundment broke in 1972, it killed 125 people and destroyed thousands of homes.
“Meeting the Gilberts and seeing Black Mountain was just really, really sad,” recalls college student Matt Roberts, who was fifteen years old when he made the trip. “It was just the worst case of environmental injustice I'd ever seen.”
A few hours northwest of Black Mountain is Hazard, Kentucky, a city of nearly 5,000 people that President Bill Clinton once held up as an example of the failure of the war on poverty. It is a city surrounded by mountaintop mining, but its residents, many of whom have “Coal Keeps the Lights On” bumper stickers on their pickup trucks, cannot truly see the impact from where they live. To grasp the full magnitude of mountaintop mining in Kentucky, you need to get in a plane.
For that reason, on day two, Steele and his students headed to Hazard Airport, where Darwin Jones, a pilot from the conservation nonprofit organization SouthWings, took them up in a small plane that resembled “a Jeep Wrangler with wings,” as Steele put it.
As someone who hates flying, Steele was more than a little on edge. But he got in first, followed by his students. What they saw together—for as far as the eye could see—was land utterly transformed from anything that looked natural.
“Words really can't describe the level of destruction and degradation and complete disrespect for the land there,” said Roberts. “You go from gorgeous mountains and trees and valleys to sludge ponds and fractured earth.”
After the plane landed, several students appeared to be in shock.
“I've never seen something so intense,” one said.
“These were all mountains at one time?” another asked.
“How is that possible?” asked a third.
On the last day of the trip, the students had many questions, and Steele created an opportunity for them to ask them at a coal processing plant.8 But the encounter was far from a one-way street, as the company representative also took the opportunity to challenge the students.
“The representative said [the coal company] was doing the world a great service,” recalls Roberts. “He said they left the land better than it was before. He said they were promoting economic growth [because you can build on flat land]. And, repeatedly, he said, ‘Coal keeps the lights on. Are you going to stop using lights?’”
Most of the students did not take these statements at face value. They had already learned that mountaintop mining provides far fewer jobs than traditional mining ever did; sites are often too unstable to build upon after mining; and reclaimed land is never as good as the natural environment.
But Roberts was particularly moved to challenge what he heard when the coal representative stated, “There's nothing wrong with the water. I'm not worried about my water.”
Having visited with Sam Gilbert, who lived near a creek as brown as chocolate milk, Roberts asked, “Are you on city water or well water?”
“I'm on city water,” the representative replied.
“All the people we talked to are on well water,” Roberts said, knowing that meant they were much more likely to be drinking water polluted by mining, since city water is treated to remove chemicals and impurities.
In the end, the coal representative stuck to his defense of mountaintop mining. But the students did not, as might be expected, adopt a simplistic oppositional posture that painted those who work in the coal industry as the “bad guys.” What they learned instead was both more complex and realistic.
Roberts, now a neuroscience major at Rhodes College in Tennessee, said the experience taught him: “We're the ones to blame. We want a lot of energy, and we want it cheap. The coal companies are meeting the demands of the people. It's a horrifying way of doing it. But if we weren't asking for it, they wouldn't be doing it. It's just the laws of supply and demand that make it cheaper and more profitable to blast the mountains.”
Students recognized, Steele added, that “it's a systemic problem—we're all connected to this, we're all in on this.”
And for anyone who might have missed the point, the connection was driven home to them as they left the plant, got into their cars, and headed back south to Spartanburg—in the same direction as a freshly loaded coal train.
Back in the classroom, Steele knew he had succeeded in awakening his students not only to the impact of mountaintop mining on the people and ecosystems of Appalachia, but also to the deep sense of caring that leads to action.
His next goal was to propel them into some kind of meaningful action. In his mind, that meant doing something more than declaring their commitment to being a more thoughtful consumer or writing about their experiences in a term paper. “The idea was to get them to reflect on their experiences and move those experiences out into the world,” Steele said.9
The class discussed possibilities and invited Gary Henderson, a reporter with the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, to speak with them.
“Okay,” Henderson said. “Who wants to help write a story for my paper?”
Christopher Riehle, now a student at the University of Chicago, volunteered. Together, Riehle and Henderson published an article in the local paper.
Other students made a poster about their trip and tried to serve glasses of water with lumps of coal inside at a public forum.
Roberts, Riehle, and students Stuart Long and Caroline Gieser also cofounded the first Spartanburg Day School Environmental Club, which grew from six to thirty members in two years.
Roberts, who served as president of the group for two years, went on to complete leadership training with the Sierra Club; he became the youngest member of the board of the Southern Energy Network, and served as head of the mountaintop removal task force for South Carolina's Palmetto Environmental Action Coalition and as president of Rhodes College's environmental group, Green Rhodes. While planning a career as a neurosurgeon, he said he has no doubt that he will continue to pursue environmental justice issues throughout his life—a commitment he credits directly to Steele and the class trip to Kentucky.
“Allyn created an experience that caught everybody's attention,” recalled Spartanburg school headmaster Chris Dorrance. “There were people living here who didn't know much about Kentucky or really believe mountaintop mining was happening. And he brought back kids with passion, and that, of course, was very good.”
Dorrance said that the experience also helped galvanize the school community about the larger issues of energy and sustainability, recognized by some as increasingly important on multiple fronts. For example, the late Roger Milliken, a prominent school board trustee and president of the world's largest textile and chemical manufacturing company, Milliken & Company, had recently told his fellow board members that rising oil prices and declining supplies made it imperative that they focus on sustainable practices—and the only way he would continue to make financial contributions to the school was if they did so.10
Dorrance, like many educators, has also observed students expressing more interest in sustainability in recent years. From the perspective of a school leader, he said, “I don't think there is any question that there is a growing imperative to address sustainability.”
What matters most in the end for a school that values social, emotional, and ecological intelligence, he said, is not only exposing students to mountaintop mining or any of the other big environmental issues of our day, but also empowering them to do something about these real-world problems.
And both Dorrance and Steele agree that the key to success lies in making connections—between the lives of students and those of people and ecosystems at the other end of our energy, food, and water supplies.
“If we are to sustain ourselves, we have to think and act differently,” Steele said. “And I think we can make education a valuable asset for that transformation.”
Notes
1 Sue Sturgis, “Latest Duke coal plant challenge targets Appalachian mountaintop removal,” Facing South, The Institute for Southern Studies, http://southernstudies.org/2008/03/latest-duke-coal-plant-challenge-targets-appalachian-mountaintop-removal.html.
2 Wendell Berry, “Wendell Berry's NKU Commencement Address Spring 2009 – Part 2” [Video] Retrieved August 24, 2011, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRgbLJnjwsQ.
3 Patty Tarquino left Kentucky after nearly seven years of working for Kentuckians for the Commonwealth because of concerns about the impact of the work on her own health. During one year she lived there, she said, her drinking water was contaminated with diesel fuel on three separate occasions.
4 From the Nature Conservancy Bad Branch State Nature Preserve website at http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/unitedstates/kentucky/placesweprotect/bad-branch-state-nature-preserve.xml.
5 The Gilberts eventually proved successful in their fight, and the coal company withdrew its permit application to build a catch pond, according to Melissa Duley, in “Paradise Purloined,” Louisville Magazine, September 2007, http://www.loumag.com/articledisplay.aspx?id=24449917.
6 John McQuaid, “Mountaintop Mining Legacy: Destroying Appalachian Streams,” Yale Environment 360, July 20, 2009, http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2172.
7 This contaminated water raised the level of lead and thallium (which cause birth defects and other disorders) in nearby water sources, according to Shaila Dewan, in “Tennessee Ash Flood Larger than Initial Estimate,” New York Times, December 26, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/us/27sludge.html.
8 The students visited B&W Resources, Inc., in Manchester, Kentucky.
9 Steele had been strongly influenced by a study abroad experience in Thailand conducted through the Council of International Educational Exchange. He currently serves on the steering committee of the Education Network for Global and Grassroots Exchange, a network of students, educators, and community organizers who work to transform learning experiences into lifelong connections and cooperative action between peoples and social movements working for a just and sustainable world.
10 As a result of Milliken's prompting and support, ninety-six geothermal wells were dug in Spartanburg, which Dorrance says now provide an ecological and cost-effective energy source.